We hear all the time about how important it is to understand the “demographics and psychographics” of our customer base and our target market.

But all too often, when I ask our customers what THEY know, I find out that they really know very little–and that’s why they come to us.

To find out how you’re doing, ask yourself whether you know these 10 key things about your customers:

1.Who is your target market?  If you’re trying to sell your products to “all women,” then that’s too broad.  You need to think clearly about who it is you’re trying to reach, to whom you’re trying to sell.

2.  What does your ideal customer look like–who is he or she?  Think about whether she’s a man or woman, age, what kind of job, what kind of house, what kind of car she or he drives.  Although you won’t have actual data on all those things, you should have a good profile like that in mind as you define your market.

3.  “Where’s the pain” in your customer base and your target market?

• What problem is it that your products or services can solve for them?
• You not only need to know what that pain is, you need to measure the width of the problem, the depth of the pain, so you can target your messages, offers, and products at that problem and pain.  Social media gives you clues and impressions, surveys let you measure it.

4.  Do you know what % of your customer base is men?

• That’s REALLY important for targeting products, offers, and messaging.
• Knowing who’s male and who’s female isn’t just a useless demographic statistic–you can use that information to target your messages differently to men and to women, by segmenting your list.

5.  Do you know what % of your customer base makes more than $75,000 a year?

• After all, you can’t market to the affluent if you don’t HAVE affluent customers or prospects.
• You should know other key demographics as well, such as the average level of education, what % are married, etc.

6.  Do you know whether your target market is growing or shrinking?

• There are lots of FREE survey data out there that can provide in-depth information about what’s happening to YOUR demographic, if you know where to look for those data and how to use them.

7.  Do you know how your frequent buyers differ from the people who don’t buy as often–or who don’t buy at all?

• Knowing that could take you a long way toward understanding what motivates people to buy your products and services.

8.  Do you know if the characteristics of your customers have changed in the last year–and if so, how?  That information can tell you a lot about who you’re reaching and who you’re converting.

9.   Do you know what makes your customers and prospects “tick?”  Are they risk takers?  Do they focus on “keeping up” with their neighbors or are they fiscally conservative?  These are important things to understand if you want to sell to those folks.

10.  Here’s one of my favorites:  What keeps your customers up at night?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you’re not alone–most of our customers can’t answer these questions.

But THAT’S why they come to us:  Because if you don’t know the answers to these questions, you’re leaving money on the table.

Knowing your market, your prospects and your customers, can double, triple, or even quadruple your profits.

We can help you put a survey system in place in your business today that will let you get all this information and more, at a price you can afford.  Find out how.

Traffic is pretty much the “Holy Grail” of online marketing.  But traffic is useless if you can’t CONVERT it into SALES.

To do that, you not only need to know “who they are,” you need to know why they came.  Because if you give them what they came for, you increase dramatically the chances that they’ll buy.

Enter the “intent index,” which measures EXACTLY why people go online and gives us an awesome opportunity.

Here are some of the things the “intent index” tells us and what they mean for us, as online marketers:

• People are more than twice as likely to go online to be entertained (82%) and to learn (88%) than to do business (39%) or to shop (31%).   Which means that if we entertain them, we increases the chances they’ll buy.  So try putting a quiz on your site–they’re fun and highly entertaining AND they educate people, which is why they can up conversions by as much as 80%!
• At least 72% go online to find a community.  So give them one!  Give folks a chance to connect on your blog or in forums.  Better yet, create a special community for them by starting a membership site!  We have a survey template for creating a membership site to order, in our new product.
• Seniors are a HUGE group that is increasingly going online.   Like younger visitors, they come online to have fun (82%) and to socialize (80%).    So you can expand your market by targeting quizzes SPECIFICALLY at senior prospects.

Increasingly, then, intent is a “new demographic.”

Do these statistics apply to YOUR customers and prospects? Do you know WHY people come to your site?

Find out!  Do surveys to find out why people are coming so you’ll know how to keep them coming back!

You’ve given us some AWESOME questions in response to our video offer and contest. (And if you haven’t put a question up yet, go here: http://www.siteproweb.com/survey-question to put a question up, get 20 free videos, AND a chance to win a cool prize!)

Several of you asked,

How can I get people to respond  to my survey?

That’s a REALLY important question, because it’s ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to get as many responses as possible to a  survey.

Why?  Because it increases the chances that your sample–the group of people who respond–will be representative.

In other words, you want the people who respond to look as much as possible like your customer base as a whole.  The more responses you get, the better the chance that you represent your customer base well.

So how do you do that?

Some of the videos we’ve put up will give you some useful information about this, but here are some of the key things.

To get response:

1. First and foremost, you get response by showing your customers “what’s in it for them” in taking your survey. It needs to be ALL about them, so that they see why they should spend time and effort to give you information.
2. You do that in many ways, but 2 of the key ways are to (a) offer incentives for taking the survey (such as, everyone who takes it gets a free report AND a chance to win something cool, like an iPod) and (b) designing the survey so that it reads as if it’s about THEM, not about YOU and how YOU can make more money. If you do that, you WILL make more money, because you’ll get the information you need.
3. Write a good survey! If you learn how to write clear, effective questions, to make your survey a conversation, and to report results to your customers and show them how you’re using the data, they’ll learn over time that your surveys are worthwhile. That takes some skill, but you’ll be surprised how fast you can learn to do good surveys, particularly with the simple recipe we’ve put together.
4. Send multiple invitations to do the survey.
5. Show your customers how you put the information they give to work to give THEM more value.

There are just some of the techniques we’re teaching.  To get the whole system, go here.

Here’s a news flash: Men and women are different.

And although that seems incredibly obvious, many online marketers ignore that fact, missing a HUGE opportunity to ramp up their marketing results.

If you don’t think it’s important to target your messages differently to men and women, then think about some of the differences between men’s and women’s Internet use that have cropped up in recent surveys.

Men represent about 48% of Internet users, according to marketing estimates. And according to eMarketer, there is a “gender gap” not only in use but also in patterns of behavior.

Lisa E. Phillips, a senior analyst at eMarketer, says that “Men spend more time online, conduct more searches on a daily basis and do not mind seeing ads . . . They are as engaged in social media as women are, and are not put off by the companies and brands they find there.”

Gallup data support her claim that men use the Internet more frequently: They estimate that a majority (53%) of men spend more than an hour on the Internet each day, whereas only 42% of women do so.

But data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project suggest that the gender differences in search behavior may be bigger and more complex than Phillips recognizes: Men search more than women for SOME kinds of things, but not others.

The Pew data show that men who use the Internet are more likely than women to get many forms of information online, including weather, news, do-it-yourself, sports, political, and financial information. They search for jobs online at higher rates than women do; download software and music more frequently; use webcams more often; are more likely to rate products, services, and people; and take classes more often.

What do “wired women” do more frequently than their male counterparts? Send and get e-mail, seek out medical and health information (not surprising, given that women are likely to be the health care “point people” in their families), get religious information, and get support to deal with health or personal issues.

And, consistent with the old stereotype that men “won’t ask for directions,” women are more likely than men to get maps and directions online.

But we may see changes in these patterns soon, because the growth rate for women’s use of government websites, watching video or listening to audio clips, and researching products are higher than the growth rates for men.

Think for a minute about how many differences we just identified in what men and women do online.

And these data are in the aggregate; we know that the patterns differ by race and ethnicity, for example, and also by age.

What does this mean for you and your business?

You’ve got to know what % of your target market, your prospects, and your customer base are men vs. women.

You need to segment your list by gender, in almost any niche, so that you can target your messages differently to men and women.

Just another example of why you need to have a segmentation strategy in place and why any type of niche marketing needs to target men and women differently.